Endings: Identity (2003)
Welcome back to Endings: less about whether the whole movie was good, more about whether it stuck the landing. Major spoilers below. This is one you should probably watch first.
Identity came from Emm’s psychological-thriller selections for Spooktober, and it might be my favorite of the festival so far. We have tried to save the best for last, although “best” is a loose term here.
B-movies are welcome, and terrible movies can be just as much fun as good ones. From our 2025 lineup.
This one was new to me, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. John Cusack, Ray Liotta, relentless rain, a dark motel, and no way out. The music supports that mood without getting carried away. Everything feels sharp, somber, and thoroughly unpleasant in the right way.
The opening scrambles the order of events, showing pieces and then circling back to explain how they fit. I want to study it again. Without knowing the twist, it is confusing enough to keep you discombobulated without losing you entirely. What initially felt like chaos and piss-poor storytelling revealed itself as meticulous storytelling later on. High impact effect, with the non-linear discombobulation.
Eventually everybody ends up at the motel, and people begin dying in ways that seem strangely related. That relationship is the secret to the whole thing.
Patting myself on the back, I figured out the twists a scene or two before the shared-birthday revelation. The opening discusses a boy abandoned at a motel by his prostitute mother. Now we have a prostitute, a little boy lurking around the edges, and people whose roles start to look meaningful if you ask how they relate to that child. The kid also seemed suspiciously absent from the list of people we were seriously considering as the killer. I’ve watched too many movies where the people off-screen are more important to the story than the ones on-screen.
I excitedly told my wife I had figured it out, then politely sat on my spoilers. When the boy returned at the end, I felt particularly smug :D
But the movie’s big reveal is more than “the kid did it.” These people are fragments of Malcolm Rivers’ psyche. The motel is the stage for a therapeutic attempt to eliminate the murderous personality, not a literal gathering of unlucky strangers. Suddenly the coincidences stop being coincidences. Everything clicks.
It reminded me of Split, with these deeply distinct personalities, although here different actors get to embody them. That works beautifully for the mystery. Liotta is a delight, and was our early bet on the killer—helped along by details like the torn, bloodied shirt beneath his coat. The movie keeps nudging suspicion around the cast, and we enjoyed watching the (bloody) baton getting handed off. Great writers who knew exactly what they were doing.
There is also a substantial philosophical question hiding under the thriller: what does responsibility mean if the self that committed a crime is not the self now facing punishment? In a world where the concept of consciousness is more hotly debated than ever I enjoyed a return to the topic on the silver screen here. The movie’s hearing turns on the hope that the dangerous identity can be removed. That is a fascinating premise, not a real-world answer about diagnosis, treatment, or criminal responsibility. I love when a nasty little mystery slips in something that big to think about, and isn’t that where horror movies have always shone?
Then the final move. Paris appears to have escaped into her orange-grove dream, only for Timmy to return. The murderous identity was not gone after all. Her death inside Malcolm’s mind gives way to his attack on the psychiatrist in the real world. The treatment failed.
The child’s return is not even the biggest twist. It is the icing on the cake—or the final nail in the coffin, depending on whether your glass is half-full or half-empty. From my perspective, spotting the twist early didn’t spoil the enjoyment of watching everything unfold in the least.
For twist-driven thrillers, I would put this toward the top of my list, somewhere in the conversation with The Usual Suspects. Extremely satisfying, very well executed, and worth paying attention to.
Twists: 9/10
Execution: 10/10
Satisfaction: 9/10
Bottom Line: A wonderful psychological thriller that rewards an attentive viewer. Its fractured-identity reveal also made an unexpectedly fitting companion to Secret Window, from Linh’s Johnny Depp selections. We did not plan that overlap, but I loved it.
AI editing disclosure
This review was heavily AI-edited using OpenAI gpt-6.1-sol through Hermes Agent. The opinions and scores come from my spoken notes; the model organized and edited them.